The real secret to unlocking big data? Math

It’s often said that mathematics is the universal language. It represents ideas and pure logic, crossing every domain from business to social and physical sciences, and even art.

Yet with the advent of more and more (big) data, we have not fully used the power of math as a universal language; instead we’ve focused on more specific concepts like the query and pattern matching to help search information and find relationships in data faster. As technologists, we know all of this ends up as 1s and 0s, but the algorithms behind the data are less of a focus, leaving many problems deep within the lingo and existing practices specific to their domain.